This guideline offers best practice advice on the assessment and management of people with psychosis and coexisting substance misuse.

Psychosis is a condition that affects a person’s mental state, including their thoughts, mood and behaviour. The symptoms of psychosis are:

hallucinations – hearing voices and sometimes seeing things that are not really there

delusions – having fixed beliefs that are false but which the person believes in completely.

Substance misuse is a broad term encompassing, in this guideline, the harmful use of any psychotropic substance, including alcohol and either legal or illicit drugs. Use of such substances is harmful when it has a negative effect on a person’s life, including their physical and mental health, relationships, work, education and finances or leads to offending behaviour.

May 2011:

Corrections to the full version of Psychosis with coexisting substance misuse (clinical guideline 120) published in March 2011

A correction has been made to the full version of this guideline to incorporate references to Cleary, M., Hunt, G. E., Matheson, S. L., Siegfried, N., Walter, G. (2008) Psychosocial interventions for people with both severe mental illness and substance misuse. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Issue 1.